Public Health

Key tasks for these sessions will be to articulate the narrative regarding justice and its relationship to other outcomes to support future advocacy, developing strategies for promoting key messages and themes in important venues and communities, articulating metrics for measuring progress, and defining what success will look like. 

Working Sessions are concurrent workshops, interactive dialogues and facilitated discussions hosted by a variety of Hague-based institutions around pressing issues and opportunities related to the Forum’s theme of “Realizing Justice for All.” 

Working Sessions are concurrent workshops, interactive dialogues and facilitated discussions hosted by a wide variety of global and local institutions around pressing issues and opportunities related to the Forum’s theme of “Realizing Justice for All.” 

Participants will learn from justice sector case studies, movements in other sectors, and communications experts how to better understand, practice, and deploy the wide range of communications tools and techniques available to achieve their messaging goals.

Working Sessions are concurrent workshops, interactive dialogues and facilitated discussions hosted by a wide variety of global and local institutions around pressing issues and opportunities related to the Forum’s theme of “Realizing Justice for All.” 

Working Sessions are concurrent workshops, interactive dialogues and facilitated discussions hosted by a wide variety of global and local institutions around pressing issues and opportunities related to the Forum’s theme of “Realizing Justice for All.”

How does the implementation and enforcement of environmental laws address the severe health effects of environmental pollution? This session explored current laws and standards, and outlined how efforts to train lawyers and judges in various countries have helped bridge the gaps between laws and health outcomes for affected populations. Speakers highlighted the importance of empowering local populations through environmental litigation, and emphasized the need to build tools and skills that can be transferred, such as learning to collect information and document health harms, legal education, and legal assistance and council. International training of lawyers in environmental law was also flagged as an important practice, particularly for private legal practitioners, who have been excluded in the past. Speakers also highlighted the significant work that must be done to establish environmental protection as a fundamental right, and to broaden the development community’s appreciation of the impact of law and justice on human development.

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There is growing evidence of links between law and health demonstrating that social problems with a legal dimension can exacerbate or create ill health and, conversely, that ill-health can create legal problems. Public health experts have identified social factors as important determinants of health, even more than genes or clinical care. This session discussed the international development of integrating social welfare legal services with health services to address both health and legal needs. Health professionals and legal practitioners have been working to combine their respective services in order to provide more integrated services, such as Medical-Legal partnerships that can help train doctors to identify legal needs and bring legal advice into health provision. Still, there is a need for sustainable resources in the long term. We need to be able to demonstrate the benefits of health justice partnerships, as well as rigorous evidence and an impassioned argument to advance the agenda.

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In order to effectively address global health issues such as HIV/AIDS, people and institutions focused on
public health and those focused on justice must work together. Discrimination and other human rights
abuses all impact the effective treatment of global health epidemics. This session explored how to build
support and partnerships between these two interconnected fields. Speakers and participants discussed
how to make the case for integrating legal empowerment and justice approaches into health programs, and
identified three key opportunities to strengthen collaboration between justice and global health, including:
increasing funding for justice related public health work; moving from ad hoc, small scale programming to
comprehensive programming brought to scale; and embedding justice programs into existing strategic
public health frameworks such as those for HIV and TB.

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When citizens are mistreated by people in power they often have little capacity to ensure justice. Citizen Helpdesks are pioneering a feedback process through which citizens use information to work with power-holders to fix problems and then disseminate information about the changes, ensuring better and more equal access to everything from healthcare to justice. This session discussed how closing the feedback loop in this way has built trust and transformed governance in Liberia, Mali, and Nepal. The first step in the Citizen Helpdesk cycle is listening. Communities select groups of volunteers who work to collect and later disseminate information. These volunteers function as community frontline associates (CFAs) and interact face-to-face with different stakeholders in the community to understand what problems they currently face. Next, these volunteers routinely gather information on critical problems using community surveys. Once collected, these data are analyzed, checked and synthesized by the Accountability Lab. The information is then disseminated to facilitate conversations with all of the pertinent local stakeholders using the most impactful mediums tailored to the local context, such as radio shows and community meetings. This process ensures that everyone understands how and when something will happen, which builds accountability into decision-making processes and closes the feedback loop that often exists between citizens, governments, the media, and the private sector. 

Read the full summary for this working session.